Computerized methods for displaying imagery are known. Existing viewers for panoramic images such as Apple Quicktime VR support rendered surfaces such as cylindrical projections. Nevertheless, most such tools are based on the idea of mapping the imagery as a texture attached to a discretized cylinder/mesh. When the user changes the point of view, the cylinder is shifted/rotated accordingly. This unfortunately can be CPU intensive: the points on the mesh are typically updated (that is, rotated and shifted) while the visible portion of the cylinder is recomputed, and the texture mapping recomputed for each polygon of the mesh (because it is attached to the cylindrical mesh that was updated). There is a need for faster techniques for rendering such images, in particular for slower browser-based Internet applications.